Callum Hamilton begins this essay on whether English football has improved since the 1990s with an interesting theory: “It’s possible that we’re currently enjoying a mini-golden age of football.” The World Cup was great; we’ve living in the gilded age of Lionel Messi v Cristiano Ronaldo and the top flight in England hasn’t been this competitive “since it were possible for Nottingham Forest to win the league”. On the other hand, the game is increasingly soulless, tasteless, exclusive, branded and expensive. Have things improved or collapsed in the last 20 years: are the players any better; are matches more entertaining; are fans better served; and have the media ruined everything? That all depends on your point of view, but it’s worth a debate.

The Commonwealth Games fill a hole in the sporting calendar but, when you think about it, the idea of devoting a multi-sport event to the Commonwealth of Nations is more than a little silly. If you didn’t bother to sit through 11 days of coverage, why not check out what you missed in this 60-minute highlights package from the BBC. There’s plenty of Clare Balding in there – and even some world class talent in the shape of Michael Johnson.

Despite Luis Suárez’s best efforts, few sports articles begin with a discussion about dentistry. Reeves Wiedeman’s intriguing profile of sculptor Blair Buswell for the New Yorker breaks that mould and sets off on a refreshingly bizarre path: “The biggest problem in Blair Buswell’s life over the past six months has been the gap in Michael Strahan’s teeth.”

Strahan’s teeth are a problem for Buswell as he is responsible for building the busts given to NFL players when they are inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Buswell is clearly at the top of his trade. He cast OJ Simpson’s likeness – after adding a few extra layers to make the head big enough – but he had never encountered a tooth-gap before. The sculptor advises his models not to smile, but the former New York Giants player wanted to show off his signature feature and was not for budging: “I presented a unique challenge, cause I told him I wanted to smile. If I close my mouth, people won’t know who it is.” The bigger man won out in the end, and the pair both had plenty to smile about at the unveiling.

Louis van Gaal is a pain the ass who likes to take out his balls in public. Manchester United have asked a man with a monumental ego to run their football team, but in fairness, the last time they did that it worked out rather well. How will it go this time around?

Brian Phillips, who describes Van Gaal as “a self-appointed genius who turned out to be an actual genius, a fragile megalomaniac, an emotional extremist tormented by the world’s failure to act as a projection of himself”, is fairly optimistic in Grantland: “If the pattern holds, Van Gaal will win the Premier League in his first or second year, call Wayne Rooney ‘a namby-pamby hog-boy’ in repeated press conferences, develop between four and six future international stars on the United youth team, declare that he deserves a Nobel Prize, openly mock the Glazer family on television, reach at least one Champions League final, and leave the club in a storm of mutual hatred after five seasons during which he wins two major and four minor trophies. The Alex Ferguson reaction shots alone will justify the experiment. It will be so much fun.”

The world went to war a century ago and, like all aspects of society, sport suffered its casualties. As Huw Richards puts it in this retrospective article for ESPN: “Trench warfare, which periodically sent men over the top in doomed assaults on machine-gun toting adversaries, might have been designed specifically as a means of killing rugby players.”

If truth is the first casualty of war, perhaps accuracy is the second. Wisden continued to publish their almanacks throughout the First World War, but as young sportsmen and cricket writers were drafted into the fighting, the remaining staff struggled to keep their obituaries free from errors. To make amends and honour the fallen soldiers, Andrew Renshaw has compiled the fully updated Wisden on the Great War: the Lives of Cricket’s Fallen 1914–1918, which includes 89 new obituaries and corrects any mistakes in the 1,788 obituaries that appeared in Wisden from 1915 to 1920.

Eamon Dunphy is probably best known to readers outside of Ireland for co-writing Roy Keane’s fearsome autobiography. He is also the author of Only A Game, one of the great books about football. These days he acts as RTÉ’s resident wind-up merchant and pundit extraordinaire.

Dunphy is never short of an opinion. He says of the Match of the Day pundits: “They just talk drivel. Whoever is winning is great; whoever isn’t, isn’t. It’s banal and also semi-literate at times. They never criticise in an intelligent way. Anything that isn’t banal is said to be an outburst. They’ve created this cartoon world where everyone talks like Lineker and says nothing.” Dunphy turned 69 this week, so the team at The Score dug out 18 of his best quotes. Intelligent criticism is Dunphy’s forte and his line about John Hartson’s extensive rear-end remains one his best: “That is not the arse of a £7m player.”

Nascar racer Eric McClure was driving at 185mph when he knew he was in trouble. His brakes had failed and he was heading for a wall: “The only thing I can remember is knowing I was going to hit the wall and just pretty well figuring that was the end of my life and just wondering if I was going to feel it.” McClure escaped alive, but concussed. After a month in recovery, he went back to work. Needs must.

Concussion has been a problem in sport for some time. Rugby players, boxers and American footballers have all been rushed back into action in the name of success, but they do not always remember their sacrifices. Christoph Kramer played through the first half of the World Cup final last month but does not recall any of it. The 23-year-old, who took a blow to the head in the early stages of the match, was so confused he asked the referee “is this the final?” from his place in the Germany midfield.

Nascar has worked to improve its record on concussion but McClure lives with the effects of his crash every day. “That changed me a little bit. Even to this day, I’m a different person in that regard than I was before,” he says. As Viv Bernsteindiscovers in this important article for the New York Times, McClure is not alone.

Parkinson began his career as a sports reporter in Barnsley, where he worked alongside Arthur Hopcraft, a football writer who would later work for the Guardian and adapt John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for the small screen. Hopcraft is probably best known for his peerless book The Football Man: People and Passions in Soccer, which documented the life of the game in the 1960s. In this episode of the Second Captains football podcast, Eoin McDevitt speaks to Parkinson about his friendship with Hopcraft and how the sport the pair covered has changed in the last 50 years.

The world of sport is awash with broken dreams. Who doesn’t know someone who would have made it but for that one injury, or that silly choice, or that little bit of bad luck. For every success story there are a thousand parables of hard luck. One tale of unfulfilled potential is unfortunate, but four young stars on the same team missing out on the NFL is carelessness worthy of a longform feature in SB Nation.